This document is the central repository for all information pertaining to debug
information in LLVM. It describes the actual format that the LLVM debug
information takes, which is useful for those interested in creating
front-ends or dealing directly with the information. Further, this document
provides specific examples of what debug information for C/C++ looks like.

The idea of the LLVM debugging information is to capture how the important
pieces of the source-language’s Abstract Syntax Tree map onto LLVM code.
Several design aspects have shaped the solution that appears here. The
important ones are:

Debugging information should have very little impact on the rest of the
compiler. No transformations, analyses, or code generators should need to
be modified because of debugging information.

Because LLVM is designed to support arbitrary programming languages,
LLVM-to-LLVM tools should not need to know anything about the semantics of
the source-level-language.

Source-level languages are often widely different from one another.
LLVM should not put any restrictions of the flavor of the source-language,
and the debugging information should work with any language.

With code generator support, it should be possible to use an LLVM compiler
to compile a program to native machine code and standard debugging
formats. This allows compatibility with traditional machine-code level
debuggers, like GDB or DBX.

The approach used by the LLVM implementation is to use a small set of
intrinsic functions to define a mapping
between LLVM program objects and the source-level objects. The description of
the source-level program is maintained in LLVM metadata in an
implementation-defined format (the C/C++ front-end
currently uses working draft 7 of the DWARF 3 standard).

When a program is being debugged, a debugger interacts with the user and turns
the stored debug information into source-language specific information. As
such, a debugger must be aware of the source-language, and is thus tied to a
specific language or family of languages.

The role of debug information is to provide meta information normally stripped
away during the compilation process. This meta information provides an LLVM
user a relationship between generated code and the original program source
code.

Currently, there are two backend consumers of debug info: DwarfDebug and
CodeViewDebug. DwarfDebug produces DWARF suitable for use with GDB, LLDB, and
other DWARF-based debuggers. CodeViewDebug produces CodeView,
the Microsoft debug info format, which is usable with Microsoft debuggers such
as Visual Studio and WinDBG. LLVM’s debug information format is mostly derived
from and inspired by DWARF, but it is feasible to translate into other target
debug info formats such as STABS.

It would also be reasonable to use debug information to feed profiling tools
for analysis of generated code, or, tools for reconstructing the original
source from generated code.

An extremely high priority of LLVM debugging information is to make it interact
well with optimizations and analysis. In particular, the LLVM debug
information provides the following guarantees:

LLVM debug information always provides information to accurately read
the source-level state of the program, regardless of which LLVM
optimizations have been run, and without any modification to the
optimizations themselves. However, some optimizations may impact the
ability to modify the current state of the program with a debugger, such
as setting program variables, or calling functions that have been
deleted.

As desired, LLVM optimizations can be upgraded to be aware of debugging
information, allowing them to update the debugging information as they
perform aggressive optimizations. This means that, with effort, the LLVM
optimizers could optimize debug code just as well as non-debug code.

LLVM debug information is automatically optimized along with the rest of
the program, using existing facilities. For example, duplicate
information is automatically merged by the linker, and unused information
is automatically removed.

Basically, the debug information allows you to compile a program with
“-O0-g” and get full debug information, allowing you to arbitrarily modify
the program as it executes from a debugger. Compiling a program with
“-O3-g” gives you full debug information that is always available and
accurate for reading (e.g., you get accurate stack traces despite tail call
elimination and inlining), but you might lose the ability to modify the program
and call functions which were optimized out of the program, or inlined away
completely.

The LLVM test suite provides a framework to test
optimizer’s handling of debugging information. It can be run like this:

% cd llvm/projects/test-suite/MultiSource/Benchmarks # or some other level
% make TEST=dbgopt

This will test impact of debugging information on optimization passes. If
debugging information influences optimization passes then it will be reported
as a failure. See LLVM Testing Infrastructure Guide for more information on LLVM test
infrastructure and how to run various tests.

LLVM debugging information has been carefully designed to make it possible for
the optimizer to optimize the program and debugging information without
necessarily having to know anything about debugging information. In
particular, the use of metadata avoids duplicated debugging information from
the beginning, and the global dead code elimination pass automatically deletes
debugging information for a function if it decides to delete the function.

To do this, most of the debugging information (descriptors for types,
variables, functions, source files, etc) is inserted by the language front-end
in the form of LLVM metadata.

Debug information is designed to be agnostic about the target debugger and
debugging information representation (e.g. DWARF/Stabs/etc). It uses a generic
pass to decode the information that represents variables, types, functions,
namespaces, etc: this allows for arbitrary source-language semantics and
type-systems to be used, as long as there is a module written for the target
debugger to interpret the information.

To provide basic functionality, the LLVM debugger does have to make some
assumptions about the source-level language being debugged, though it keeps
these to a minimum. The only common features that the LLVM debugger assumes
exist are source files, and program objects. These abstract objects are used by a
debugger to form stack traces, show information about local variables, etc.

This section of the documentation first describes the representation aspects
common to any source-language. C/C++ front-end specific debug information describes the data layout
conventions used by the C and C++ front-ends.

This intrinsic provides information about a local element (e.g., variable).
The first argument is metadata holding the address of variable, typically a
static alloca in the function entry block. The second argument is a
local variable containing a description of
the variable. The third argument is a complex expression. An llvm.dbg.addr intrinsic describes the
address of a source variable.

A frontend should generate exactly one call to llvm.dbg.addr at the point
of declaration of a source variable. Optimization passes that fully promote the
variable from memory to SSA values will replace this call with possibly
multiple calls to llvm.dbg.value. Passes that delete stores are effectively
partial promotion, and they will insert a mix of calls to llvm.dbg.value
and llvm.dbg.addr to track the source variable value when it is available.
After optimization, there may be multiple calls to llvm.dbg.addr describing
the program points where the variables lives in memory. All calls for the same
concrete source variable must agree on the memory location.

This intrinsic is identical to llvm.dbg.addr, except that there can only be
one call to llvm.dbg.declare for a given concrete local variable. It is not control-dependent, meaning that if
a call to llvm.dbg.declare exists and has a valid location argument, that
address is considered to be the true home of the variable across its entire
lifetime. This makes it hard for optimizations to preserve accurate debug info
in the presence of llvm.dbg.declare, so we are transitioning away from it,
and we plan to deprecate it in future LLVM releases.

This intrinsic provides information when a user source variable is set to a new
value. The first argument is the new value (wrapped as metadata). The second
argument is a local variable containing a
description of the variable. The third argument is a complex expression.

An llvm.dbg.value intrinsic describes the value of a source variable
directly, not its address. Note that the value operand of this intrinsic may
be indirect (i.e, a pointer to the source variable), provided that interpreting
the complex expression derives the direct value.

In many languages, the local variables in functions can have their lifetimes or
scopes limited to a subset of a function. In the C family of languages, for
example, variables are only live (readable and writable) within the source
block that they are defined in. In functional languages, values are only
readable after they have been defined. Though this is a very obvious concept,
it is non-trivial to model in LLVM, because it has no notion of scoping in this
sense, and does not want to be tied to a language’s scoping rules.

In order to handle this, the LLVM debug format uses the metadata attached to
llvm instructions to encode line number and scoping information. Consider the
following C fragment, for example:

This example illustrates a few important details about LLVM debugging
information. In particular, it shows how the llvm.dbg.declare intrinsic and
location information, which are attached to an instruction, are applied
together to allow a debugger to analyze the relationship between statements,
variable definitions, and the code used to implement the function.

Here !14 is metadata providing location information. In this example, scope is encoded by !4, a
subprogram descriptor. This way the location
information attached to the intrinsics indicates that the variable X is
declared at line number 2 at a function level scope in function foo.

The C and C++ front-ends represent information about the program in a format
that is effectively identical to DWARF 3.0 in terms of information
content. This allows code generators to trivially support native debuggers by
generating standard dwarf information, and contains enough information for
non-dwarf targets to translate it as needed.

This section describes the forms used to represent C and C++ programs. Other
languages could pattern themselves after this (which itself is tuned to
representing programs in the same way that DWARF 3 does), or they could choose
to provide completely different forms if they don’t fit into the DWARF model.
As support for debugging information gets added to the various LLVM
source-language front-ends, the information used should be documented here.

The following sections provide examples of a few C/C++ constructs and the debug
information that would best describe those constructs. The canonical
references are the DIDescriptor classes defined in
include/llvm/IR/DebugInfo.h and the implementations of the helper functions
in lib/IR/DIBuilder.cpp.

The align value in DIGlobalVariable description specifies variable alignment in
case it was forced by C11 _Alignas(), C++11 alignas() keywords or compiler
attribute __attribute__((aligned ())). In other case (when this field is missing)
alignment is considered default. This is used when producing DWARF output
for DW_AT_alignment value.

Objective C provides a simpler way to declare and define accessor methods using
declared properties. The language provides features to declare a property and
to let compiler synthesize accessor methods.

The debugger lets developer inspect Objective C interfaces and their instance
variables and class variables. However, the debugger does not know anything
about the properties defined in Objective C interfaces. The debugger consumes
information generated by compiler in DWARF format. The format does not support
encoding of Objective C properties. This proposal describes DWARF extensions to
encode Objective C properties, which the debugger can use to let developers
inspect Objective C properties.

Objective C properties exist separately from class members. A property can be
defined only by “setter” and “getter” selectors, and be calculated anew on each
access. Or a property can just be a direct access to some declared ivar.
Finally it can have an ivar “automatically synthesized” for it by the compiler,
in which case the property can be referred to in user code directly using the
standard C dereference syntax as well as through the property “dot” syntax, but
there is no entry in the @interface declaration corresponding to this ivar.

To facilitate debugging, these properties we will add a new DWARF TAG into the
DW_TAG_structure_type definition for the class to hold the description of a
given property, and a set of DWARF attributes that provide said description.
The property tag will also contain the name and declared type of the property.

If there is a related ivar, there will also be a DWARF property attribute placed
in the DW_TAG_member DIE for that ivar referring back to the property TAG
for that property. And in the case where the compiler synthesizes the ivar
directly, the compiler is expected to generate a DW_TAG_member for that
ivar (with the DW_AT_artificial set to 1), whose name will be the name used
to access this ivar directly in code, and with the property attribute pointing
back to the property it is backing.

Note, the current convention is that the name of the ivar for an
auto-synthesized property is the name of the property from which it derives
with an underscore prepended, as is shown in the example. But we actually
don’t need to know this convention, since we are given the name of the ivar
directly.

Also, it is common practice in ObjC to have different property declarations in
the @interface and @implementation - e.g. to provide a read-only property in
the interface,and a read-write interface in the implementation. In that case,
the compiler should emit whichever property declaration will be in force in the
current translation unit.

Developers can decorate a property with attributes which are encoded using
DW_AT_APPLE_property_attribute.

The “.debug_pubnames” and “.debug_pubtypes” formats are not what a
debugger needs. The “pub” in the section name indicates that the entries
in the table are publicly visible names only. This means no static or hidden
functions show up in the “.debug_pubnames”. No static variables or private
class variables are in the “.debug_pubtypes”. Many compilers add different
things to these tables, so we can’t rely upon the contents between gcc, icc, or
clang.

The typical query given by users tends not to match up with the contents of
these tables. For example, the DWARF spec states that “In the case of the name
of a function member or static data member of a C++ structure, class or union,
the name presented in the “.debug_pubnames” section is not the simple name
given by the DW_AT_nameattribute of the referenced debugging information
entry, but rather the fully qualified name of the data or function member.”
So the only names in these tables for complex C++ entries is a fully
qualified name. Debugger users tend not to enter their search strings as
“a::b::c(int,constFoo&)const”, but rather as “c”, “b::c” , or
“a::b::c”. So the name entered in the name table must be demangled in
order to chop it up appropriately and additional names must be manually entered
into the table to make it effective as a name lookup table for debuggers to
use.

All debuggers currently ignore the “.debug_pubnames” table as a result of
its inconsistent and useless public-only name content making it a waste of
space in the object file. These tables, when they are written to disk, are not
sorted in any way, leaving every debugger to do its own parsing and sorting.
These tables also include an inlined copy of the string values in the table
itself making the tables much larger than they need to be on disk, especially
for large C++ programs.

Can’t we just fix the sections by adding all of the names we need to this
table? No, because that is not what the tables are defined to contain and we
won’t know the difference between the old bad tables and the new good tables.
At best we could make our own renamed sections that contain all of the data we
need.

These tables are also insufficient for what a debugger like LLDB needs. LLDB
uses clang for its expression parsing where LLDB acts as a PCH. LLDB is then
often asked to look for type “foo” or namespace “bar”, or list items in
namespace “baz”. Namespaces are not included in the pubnames or pubtypes
tables. Since clang asks a lot of questions when it is parsing an expression,
we need to be very fast when looking up names, as it happens a lot. Having new
accelerator tables that are optimized for very quick lookups will benefit this
type of debugging experience greatly.

We would like to generate name lookup tables that can be mapped into memory
from disk, and used as is, with little or no up-front parsing. We would also
be able to control the exact content of these different tables so they contain
exactly what we need. The Name Accelerator Tables were designed to fix these
issues. In order to solve these issues we need to:

Have a format that can be mapped into memory from disk and used as is

Lookups should be very fast

Extensible table format so these tables can be made by many producers

Contain all of the names needed for typical lookups out of the box

Strict rules for the contents of tables

Table size is important and the accelerator table format should allow the reuse
of strings from common string tables so the strings for the names are not
duplicated. We also want to make sure the table is ready to be used as-is by
simply mapping the table into memory with minimal header parsing.

The name lookups need to be fast and optimized for the kinds of lookups that
debuggers tend to do. Optimally we would like to touch as few parts of the
mapped table as possible when doing a name lookup and be able to quickly find
the name entry we are looking for, or discover there are no matches. In the
case of debuggers we optimized for lookups that fail most of the time.

Each table that is defined should have strict rules on exactly what is in the
accelerator tables and documented so clients can rely on the content.

So for bucket[3] in the example above, we have an offset into the table
0x000034f0 which points to a chain of entries for the bucket. Each bucket must
contain a next pointer, full 32 bit hash value, the string itself, and the data
for the current string value.

The problem with this layout for debuggers is that we need to optimize for the
negative lookup case where the symbol we’re searching for is not present. So
if we were to lookup “printf” in the table above, we would make a 32-bit
hash for “printf”, it might match bucket[3]. We would need to go to
the offset 0x000034f0 and start looking to see if our 32 bit hash matches. To
do so, we need to read the next pointer, then read the hash, compare it, and
skip to the next bucket. Each time we are skipping many bytes in memory and
touching new pages just to do the compare on the full 32 bit hash. All of
these accesses then tell us that we didn’t have a match.

To solve the issues mentioned above we have structured the hash tables a bit
differently: a header, buckets, an array of all unique 32 bit hash values,
followed by an array of hash value data offsets, one for each hash value, then
the data for all hash values:

The BUCKETS in the name tables are an index into the HASHES array. By
making all of the full 32 bit hash values contiguous in memory, we allow
ourselves to efficiently check for a match while touching as little memory as
possible. Most often checking the 32 bit hash values is as far as the lookup
goes. If it does match, it usually is a match with no collisions. So for a
table with “n_buckets” buckets, and “n_hashes” unique 32 bit hash
values, we can clarify the contents of the BUCKETS, HASHES and
OFFSETS as:

So we still have all of the same data, we just organize it more efficiently for
debugger lookup. If we repeat the same “printf” lookup from above, we
would hash “printf” and find it matches BUCKETS[3] by taking the 32 bit
hash value and modulo it by n_buckets. BUCKETS[3] contains “6” which
is the index into the HASHES table. We would then compare any consecutive
32 bit hashes values in the HASHES array as long as the hashes would be in
BUCKETS[3]. We do this by verifying that each subsequent hash value modulo
n_buckets is still 3. In the case of a failed lookup we would access the
memory for BUCKETS[3], and then compare a few consecutive 32 bit hashes
before we know that we have no match. We don’t end up marching through
multiple words of memory and we really keep the number of processor data cache
lines being accessed as small as possible.

The string hash that is used for these lookup tables is the Daniel J.
Bernstein hash which is also used in the ELF GNU_HASH sections. It is a
very good hash for all kinds of names in programs with very few hash
collisions.

Empty buckets are designated by using an invalid hash index of UINT32_MAX.

These name hash tables are designed to be generic where specializations of the
table get to define additional data that goes into the header (“HeaderData”),
how the string value is stored (“KeyType”) and the content of the data for each
hash value.

The header has a fixed part, and the specialized part. The exact format of the
header is:

structHeader{uint32_tmagic;// 'HASH' magic value to allow endian detectionuint16_tversion;// Version numberuint16_thash_function;// The hash function enumeration that was useduint32_tbucket_count;// The number of buckets in this hash tableuint32_thashes_count;// The total number of unique hash values and hash data offsets in this tableuint32_theader_data_len;// The bytes to skip to get to the hash indexes (buckets) for correct alignment// Specifically the length of the following HeaderData field - this does not// include the size of the preceding fieldsHeaderDataheader_data;// Implementation specific header data};

The header starts with a 32 bit “magic” value which must be 'HASH'
encoded as an ASCII integer. This allows the detection of the start of the
hash table and also allows the table’s byte order to be determined so the table
can be correctly extracted. The “magic” value is followed by a 16 bit
version number which allows the table to be revised and modified in the
future. The current version number is 1. hash_function is a uint16_t
enumeration that specifies which hash function was used to produce this table.
The current values for the hash function enumerations include:

bucket_count is a 32 bit unsigned integer that represents how many buckets
are in the BUCKETS array. hashes_count is the number of unique 32 bit
hash values that are in the HASHES array, and is the same number of offsets
are contained in the OFFSETS array. header_data_len specifies the size
in bytes of the HeaderData that is filled in by specialized versions of
this table.

The header is followed by the buckets, hashes, offsets, and hash value data.

structFixedTable{uint32_tbuckets[Header.bucket_count];// An array of hash indexes into the "hashes[]" array belowuint32_thashes[Header.hashes_count];// Every unique 32 bit hash for the entire table is in this tableuint32_toffsets[Header.hashes_count];// An offset that corresponds to each item in the "hashes[]" array above};

buckets is an array of 32 bit indexes into the hashes array. The
hashes array contains all of the 32 bit hash values for all names in the
hash table. Each hash in the hashes table has an offset in the offsets
array that points to the data for the hash value.

This table setup makes it very easy to repurpose these tables to contain
different data, while keeping the lookup mechanism the same for all tables.
This layout also makes it possible to save the table to disk and map it in
later and do very efficient name lookups with little or no parsing.

DWARF lookup tables can be implemented in a variety of ways and can store a lot
of information for each name. We want to make the DWARF tables extensible and
able to store the data efficiently so we have used some of the DWARF features
that enable efficient data storage to define exactly what kind of data we store
for each name.

The HeaderData contains a definition of the contents of each HashData chunk.
We might want to store an offset to all of the debug information entries (DIEs)
for each name. To keep things extensible, we create a list of items, or
Atoms, that are contained in the data for each name. First comes the type of
the data in each atom:

enumAtomType{eAtomTypeNULL=0u,eAtomTypeDIEOffset=1u,// DIE offset, check form for encodingeAtomTypeCUOffset=2u,// DIE offset of the compiler unit header that contains the item in questioneAtomTypeTag=3u,// DW_TAG_xxx value, should be encoded as DW_FORM_data1 (if no tags exceed 255) or DW_FORM_data2eAtomTypeNameFlags=4u,// Flags from enum NameFlagseAtomTypeTypeFlags=5u,// Flags from enum TypeFlags};

The enumeration values and their meanings are:

eAtomTypeNULL - a termination atom that specifies the end of the atom list
eAtomTypeDIEOffset - an offset into the .debug_info section for the DWARF DIE for this name
eAtomTypeCUOffset - an offset into the .debug_info section for the CU that contains the DIE
eAtomTypeDIETag - The DW_TAG_XXX enumeration value so you don't have to parse the DWARF to see what it is
eAtomTypeNameFlags - Flags for functions and global variables (isFunction, isInlined, isExternal...)
eAtomTypeTypeFlags - Flags for types (isCXXClass, isObjCClass, ...)

Then we allow each atom type to define the atom type and how the data for each
atom type data is encoded:

HeaderData defines the base DIE offset that should be added to any atoms
that are encoded using the DW_FORM_ref1, DW_FORM_ref2,
DW_FORM_ref4, DW_FORM_ref8 or DW_FORM_ref_udata. It also defines
what is contained in each HashData object – Atom.form tells us how large
each field will be in the HashData and the Atom.type tells us how this data
should be interpreted.

For the current implementations of the “.apple_names” (all functions +
globals), the “.apple_types” (names of all types that are defined), and
the “.apple_namespaces” (all namespaces), we currently set the Atom
array to be:

This defines the contents to be the DIE offset (eAtomTypeDIEOffset) that is
encoded as a 32 bit value (DW_FORM_data4). This allows a single name to have
multiple matching DIEs in a single file, which could come up with an inlined
function for instance. Future tables could include more information about the
DIE such as flags indicating if the DIE is a function, method, block,
or inlined.

The KeyType for the DWARF table is a 32 bit string table offset into the
“.debug_str” table. The “.debug_str” is the string table for the DWARF which
may already contain copies of all of the strings. This helps make sure, with
help from the compiler, that we reuse the strings between all of the DWARF
sections and keeps the hash table size down. Another benefit to having the
compiler generate all strings as DW_FORM_strp in the debug info, is that
DWARF parsing can be made much faster.

After a lookup is made, we get an offset into the hash data. The hash data
needs to be able to deal with 32 bit hash collisions, so the chunk of data
at the offset in the hash data consists of a triple:

uint32_tstr_offsetuint32_thash_data_countHashData[hash_data_count]

If “str_offset” is zero, then the bucket contents are done. 99.9% of the
hash data chunks contain a single item (no 32 bit hash collision):

As we said, we want to strictly define exactly what is included in the
different tables. For DWARF, we have 3 tables: “.apple_names”,
“.apple_types”, and “.apple_namespaces”.

“.apple_names” sections should contain an entry for each DWARF DIE whose
DW_TAG is a DW_TAG_label, DW_TAG_inlined_subroutine, or
DW_TAG_subprogram that has address attributes: DW_AT_low_pc,
DW_AT_high_pc, DW_AT_ranges or DW_AT_entry_pc. It also contains
DW_TAG_variable DIEs that have a DW_OP_addr in the location (global and
static variables). All global and static variables should be included,
including those scoped within functions and classes. For example using the
following code:

staticintvar=0;voidf(){staticintvar=0;}

Both of the static var variables would be included in the table. All
functions should emit both their full names and their basenames. For C or C++,
the full name is the mangled name (if available) which is usually in the
DW_AT_MIPS_linkage_name attribute, and the DW_AT_name contains the
function basename. If global or static variables have a mangled name in a
DW_AT_MIPS_linkage_name attribute, this should be emitted along with the
simple name found in the DW_AT_name attribute.

“.apple_types” sections should contain an entry for each DWARF DIE whose
tag is one of:

DW_TAG_array_type

DW_TAG_class_type

DW_TAG_enumeration_type

DW_TAG_pointer_type

DW_TAG_reference_type

DW_TAG_string_type

DW_TAG_structure_type

DW_TAG_subroutine_type

DW_TAG_typedef

DW_TAG_union_type

DW_TAG_ptr_to_member_type

DW_TAG_set_type

DW_TAG_subrange_type

DW_TAG_base_type

DW_TAG_const_type

DW_TAG_file_type

DW_TAG_namelist

DW_TAG_packed_type

DW_TAG_volatile_type

DW_TAG_restrict_type

DW_TAG_atomic_type

DW_TAG_interface_type

DW_TAG_unspecified_type

DW_TAG_shared_type

Only entries with a DW_AT_name attribute are included, and the entry must
not be a forward declaration (DW_AT_declaration attribute with a non-zero
value). For example, using the following code:

The DW_TAG_pointer_type is not included because it does not have a DW_AT_name.

“.apple_namespaces” section should contain all DW_TAG_namespace DIEs.
If we run into a namespace that has no name this is an anonymous namespace, and
the name should be output as “(anonymousnamespace)” (without the quotes).
Why? This matches the output of the abi::cxa_demangle() that is in the
standard C++ library that demangles mangled names.

“.apple_objc” section should contain all DW_TAG_subprogram DIEs for an
Objective-C class. The name used in the hash table is the name of the
Objective-C class itself. If the Objective-C class has a category, then an
entry is made for both the class name without the category, and for the class
name with the category. So if we have a DIE at offset 0x1234 with a name of
method “-[NSString(my_additions)stringWithSpecialString:]”, we would add
an entry for “NSString” that points to DIE 0x1234, and an entry for
“NSString(my_additions)” that points to 0x1234. This allows us to quickly
track down all Objective-C methods for an Objective-C class when doing
expressions. It is needed because of the dynamic nature of Objective-C where
anyone can add methods to a class. The DWARF for Objective-C methods is also
emitted differently from C++ classes where the methods are not usually
contained in the class definition, they are scattered about across one or more
compile units. Categories can also be defined in different shared libraries.
So we need to be able to quickly find all of the methods and class functions
given the Objective-C class name, or quickly find all methods and class
functions for a class + category name. This table does not contain any
selector names, it just maps Objective-C class names (or class names +
category) to all of the methods and class functions. The selectors are added
as function basenames in the “.debug_names” section.

In the “.apple_names” section for Objective-C functions, the full name is
the entire function name with the brackets (“-[NSStringstringWithCString:]”) and the basename is the selector only
(“stringWithCString:”).

CodeView as a format is clearly oriented around C++ debugging, and in C++, the
majority of debug information tends to be type information. Therefore, the
overriding design constraint of CodeView is the separation of type information
from other “symbol” information so that type information can be efficiently
merged across translation units. Both type information and symbol information is
generally stored as a sequence of records, where each record begins with a
16-bit record size and a 16-bit record kind.

Type information is usually stored in the .debug$T section of the object
file. All other debug info, such as line info, string table, symbol info, and
inlinee info, is stored in one or more .debug$S sections. There may only be
one .debug$T section per object file, since all other debug info refers to
it. If a PDB (enabled by the /Zi MSVC option) was used during compilation,
the .debug$T section will contain only an LF_TYPESERVER2 record pointing
to the PDB. When using PDBs, symbol information appears to remain in the object
file .debug$S sections.

Type records are referred to by their index, which is the number of records in
the stream before a given record plus 0x1000. Many common basic types, such
as the basic integral types and unqualified pointers to them, are represented
using type indices less than 0x1000. Such basic types are built in to
CodeView consumers and do not require type records.

Each type record may only contain type indices that are less than its own type
index. This ensures that the graph of type stream references is acyclic. While
the source-level type graph may contain cycles through pointer types (consider a
linked list struct), these cycles are removed from the type stream by always
referring to the forward declaration record of user-defined record types. Only
“symbol” records in the .debug$S streams may refer to complete,
non-forward-declaration type records.

The debugify synthetic debug info testing utility consists of two
main parts. The debugify pass and the check-debugify one. They are
meant to be used with opt for development purposes.

The first applies synthetic debug information to every instruction of the module,
while the latter checks that this DI is still available after an optimization
has occurred, reporting any errors/warnings while doing so.

The instructions are assigned sequentially increasing line locations,
and are immediately used by debug value intrinsics when possible.

Errors/warnings can range from instructions with empty debug location to an
instruction having a type that’s incompatible with the source variable it describes,
all the way to missing lines and missing debug value intrinsics.

In the case of missing debug location, Instruction::setDebugLoc or possibly
IRBuilder::setCurrentDebugLocation when using a Builder and the new location
should be reused.

When a debug value has incompatible type llvm::replaceAllDbgUsesWith can be used.
After a RAUW call an incompatible type error can occur because RAUW does not handle
widening and narrowing of variables while llvm::replaceAllDbgUsesWith does. It is
also capable of changing the DWARF expression used by the debugger to describe the variable.
It also prevents use-before-def by salvaging or deleting invalid debug values.

When a debug value is missing llvm::salvageDebugInfo can be used when no replacement
exists, or llvm::replaceAllDbgUsesWith when a replacement exists.

The -debugify pass is especially helpful when it comes to testing that
a given pass preserves DI while transforming the module. For this to work,
the -debugify output must be stable enough to use in regression tests.
Changes to this pass are not allowed to break existing tests.

It allows us to test for DI loss in the same tests we check that the
transformation is actually doing what it should.

Here is an example from test/Transforms/InstCombine/cast-mul-select.ll:

Here we test that the two dbg.value instrinsics are preserved and
are correctly pointing to the [[C]] and [[D]] variables.

Note

Note, that when writing this kind of regression tests, it is important
to make them as robust as possible. That’s why we should try to avoid
hardcoding line/variable numbers in check lines. If for example you test
for a DILocation to have a specific line number, and someone later adds
an instruction before the one we check the test will fail. In the cases this
can’t be avoided (say, if a test wouldn’t be precise enough), moving the
test to it’s own file is preferred.